For email updates from the Hayden Planetarium, sign up for StarStruck here.

2007 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Pioneer Anomaly

Monday, March 26, 2007

The Pioneer spacecraft, two identical unmanned planetary probes, were launched in the early 1970s on trajectories that would send them past the outer planets and onward with enough speed to leave the Solar System entirely—a first in space exploration. While attempting to account for all known forces that act on these craft, scientists analyzed the telemetry signals from the craft and found an inconsistency. The positions of the craft do not match the scientists' predictions. There seems to be an extra force at work, not included in the analysis, which has affected the motion of these craft across decades of monitoring their signals, from launch until their last contact.

The big questions are: What is this force? Is it an unforeseen glitch of spacecraft design? Is it a sign of the discovery of new physics or a new understanding of gravity? Or simply of something in our present knowledge of physics that has been overlooked?

Panelists

John D. Anderson—Senior Research Scientist, Global Aerospace Corporation, formerly of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; led the team in 1998 that discovered the Pioneer Anomaly

Ed Belbruno—Visiting Research Collaborator in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University; President and Founder of Innovative Orbital Design, Inc.